Untamed and Unabashed: Essays on Women and Humor in British Literature By Regina Barreca Wayne State University Press April 1994 Hardcover ISBN#: 0814321364 Purchase this text online at Amazon.com Exploring the strategic use of humor in works by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brönte, George Eliot, Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark, and Fay Weldon, Regina Barreca demonstrates how women's humor--deployed in coded forms that, for the most part, only women readers would understand--explodes oppressive social conventions and implicitly critiques dominant cultural ideologies. Barreca asserts that women's comic play has to do with insurgency and outlawry, ultimately working to shake, topple, and rebuild the social architectures that restrict women's access to power. Through detailed, persuasive new readings of her chosen authors, Barreca shows how, through humor, the straightjacket of conventional femininity is challenged, confronted, and finally, thrown off. ~Of course, women--writers and critics--have a sense of humor, as Regina Barreca demonstrates in Untamed and Unabashed. Women's laughter is witty, wicked, and wild. It disrupts the social order designed to keep them in their place, and it displaces political action from government to gender. --Blanche Gelfant, Dartmouth College ~You heard the one about--? Well, there's this woman, see, smart beyond belief and even more incredibly gracious, you know, and she walks in, this woman does, to her computer one day...and what comes out is this book--you with me?--that's all about comedy as a gendered form...not some universal tickling of a uniform 'sense of humor' we all share, but a powerful and wondrous strange way of 'making trouble.' Well, this woman, the learned one, is also very funny herself and less interested in making trouble than in making available this beautiful argument about women and humor by way of...some of the most subtle and zinging readings of key literary texts I've ever seen....And this book is called Untamed and Unabashed and the brilliant author, oh yes, is Regina Barreca, which won't surprise you one bit. --James Kincaid, University of Southern California Purchase this text online at Amazon.com